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Final drafts

Saturday, 6th September 2008

The Washington Post comes up with a short list of great unfinished novels. Robert Musil, Scott Fitzgerald and Rebecca West all make the cut. So too, oddly enough, does Huck Finn:

I know, I know: Technically, Twain's masterpiece comes to an end, but we might have been better off if it hadn't. Twain ran out of inspiration after Huck made his wrenching decision to go to hell rather than hand Jim over to the slave-catchers. Some years later, the author decided to conclude his story by bringing back Tom Sawyer, and the silly result is perhaps the biggest let-down in all of fiction. John Seelye, among others, has written an alternative ending, but my solution is simply to stop reading at the end of Chapter 31 and pretend that the misbegotten rest of it never happened.
Two more suggestions for a list of excellent works with disastrous endings: "The Bertrams", Trollope's chronicle of Victorian greasy-pole climbers,  and Patrick Hamilton's "Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse", in which you can see the alcoholism starting to run amok.

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